South Carolina a unanimous No. in women's AP Top 25 after 2 wins to open repeat bid; Stanford, Oregon crack rankings.

The Gamecocks earned a hard-fought six-point win over Michigan in Las Vegas to open the season and beat then-No. 9 North Carolina State on Sunday by 14. The two victories made the defending champions a unanimous choice from the 31-member national media panel. In the preseason poll, No. 2 UConn got two first-place votes and No. 3 USC one.

Donna M. Wilcock
May 1, 2003; 23:3745-3751
Development Plasticity Repair

Fadel Zeidan
Nov 18, 2015; 35:15307-15325
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Kong-Fatt Wong
Jan 25, 2006; 26:1314-1328
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Martijn P. van den Heuvel
Nov 2, 2011; 31:15775-15786
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Rodent jaws evolved structurally to support dual functionality, for either biting or chewing food. Rodent hands also function dually during food handling, for actively manipulating or statically holding food. How are these oral and manual functions coordinated? We combined electrophysiological recording of muscle activity and kilohertz kinematic tracking to analyze masseter and hand actions as mice of both sexes handled food. Masseter activity was organized into two modes synchronized to hand movement modes. In holding/chewing mode, mastication occurred as rhythmic (~5 Hz) masseter activity while the hands held food below the mouth. In oromanual/ingestion mode, bites occurred as lower-amplitude aperiodic masseter events that were precisely timed to follow regrips (by ~200 ms). Thus, jaw and hand movements are flexibly coordinated during food handling: uncoupled in holding/chewing mode and tightly coordinated in oromanual/ingestion mode as regrip–bite sequences. Key features of this coordination were captured in a simple model of hierarchically orchestrated mode-switching and intramode action sequencing. We serendipitously detected an additional masseter-related action, tooth sharpening, identified as bouts of higher-frequency (~13 Hz) rhythmic masseter activity, which was accompanied by eye displacement, including rhythmic proptosis, attributable to masseter contractions. Collectively, the findings demonstrate how a natural, complex, and goal-oriented activity is organized as an assemblage of distinct modes and complex actions, adapted for the divisions of function arising from anatomical structure. These results reveal intricate, high-speed coordination of disparate effectors and show how natural forms of dexterity can serve as a model for understanding the behavioral neurobiology of multi-body-part coordination.

The brain's extracellular matrix (ECM) regulates neuronal plasticity and animal behavior. ECM staining shows a net-like structure around a subset of neurons, a ring-like structure at the nodes of Ranvier, and diffuse staining in the interstitial matrix. However, understanding the structural features of ECM deposition across various neuronal types and subcellular compartments remains limited. To visualize the organization pattern and assembly process of the hyaluronan-scaffolded ECM in the brain, we fused a HaloTag to hyaluronan proteoglycan link protein 1, which links hyaluronan and proteoglycans. Expression or application of the probe in primary rat neuronal cultures enables us to identify spatial and temporal regulation of ECM deposition and heterogeneity in ECM aggregation among neuronal populations. Dual-color birthdating shows the ECM assembly process in culture and in vivo. Sparse expression in mouse brains of either sex reveals detailed ECM architectures around excitatory neurons and developmentally regulated dendritic ECM. Our study uncovers extensive structural features of the brain's ECM, suggesting diverse roles in regulating neuronal plasticity.

Low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS) is a novel technique for noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS). TUS delivered in a theta (5 Hz) burst pattern (tbTUS) induces plasticity in the human primary motor cortex (M1) for 30–60 min, showing promise for therapeutic development. Metaplasticity refers to activity-dependent changes in neural functions governing synaptic plasticity; depotentiation is the reversal of long-term potentiation (LTP) by a subsequent protocol with no effect alone. Metaplasticity can enhance plasticity induction and clinical efficacy of NIBS protocols. In our study, we compared four NIBS protocol combinations to investigate metaplasticity on tbTUS in humans of either sex. We delivered four interventions: (1) sham continuous theta burst stimulation with 150 pulses (cTBS150) followed by real tbTUS (tbTUS only), (2) real cTBS150 followed by sham tbTUS (cTBS only), (3) real cTBS150 followed by real tbTUS (metaplasticity), and (4) real tbTUS followed by real cTBS150 (depotentiation). We measured motor-evoked potential amplitude, short-interval intracortical inhibition, long-interval intracortical inhibition, intracortical facilitation (ICF), and short-interval intracortical facilitation before and up to 90 min after plasticity intervention. Plasticity effects lasted at least 60 min longer when tbTUS was primed with cTBS150 compared with tbTUS alone. Plasticity was abolished when cTBS150 was delivered after tbTUS. cTBS150 alone had no significant effect. No changes in M1 intracortical circuits were observed. Plasticity induction by tbTUS can be modified in manners consistent with homeostatic metaplasticity and depotentiation. This substantiates evidence that tbTUS induces LTP-like processes and suggests that metaplasticity can be harnessed in the therapeutic development of TUS.

Words offer a unique opportunity to separate the processing mechanisms of object subcomponents from those of the whole object, because the phonological or semantic information provided by the word subcomponents (i.e., sublexical information) can conflict with that provided by the whole word (i.e., lexical information). Previous studies have revealed some of the specific brain regions and temporal information involved in sublexical information processing. However, a comprehensive spatiotemporal neural network for sublexical processing remains to be fully elucidated due to the low temporal or spatial resolutions of previous neuroimaging studies. In this study, we recorded stereoelectroencephalography signals with high spatial and temporal resolutions from a large sample of 39 epilepsy patients (both sexes) during a Chinese character oral reading task. We explored the activated brain regions and their connectivity related to three sublexical effects: phonological regularity (whether the whole character's pronunciation aligns with its phonetic radical), phonological consistency (whether characters with the same phonetic radical share the same pronunciation), and semantic transparency (whether the whole character's meaning aligns with its semantic radical). The results revealed that sublexical effects existed in the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral and postcentral gyri, temporal lobe, and middle occipital gyrus. Additionally, connectivity from the middle occipital gyrus to the postcentral gyrus and from postcentral gyrus to the fusiform gyrus was associated with the sublexical effects. These findings provide valuable insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of sublexical processing and object recognition in the brain.

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Written by the former chief historian of NASA, the book examines the evolution of our cosmic understanding—from early civilizations to the present day

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